If you drew a Venn diagram of those who felt that Colin Kaepernick should have kept his politics separate from his NFL job, and those who applauded Donald Trump for calling players who kneel during the national anthem “sons of bitches” who deserve to be fired, I suspect it would look a lot like a single circle.

That sort of cognitive dissonance has become a staple of our times. So, much groaning and fist-shaking when an athlete dares not stick to sports, but also furious nodding and fist-pumping when the U.S. President spends his weekend blasting football players, disinviting an NBA team to the White House and then calling for an NFL boycott when it becomes clear that the league is not about to go on a firing spree at his behest.

That Trump has found a receptive audience for his ranting is not a surprise. (That’s another staple of our times: there is always an audience for his rantings.) But that the NFL has pushed back so significantly is at least somewhat unexpected. This is a league run by exceedingly wealthy men, several of whom proudly call Trump a friend and who donated millions to his political cause. In this one way, the most divisive president in history has finally managed to be a uniter.

Before Sunday, the number of people around the NFL who had shown much public support for the Kaepernick cause was tiny. You could have barely fielded a starting 11, let alone filled out a 53-man roster with those who felt strongly enough about drawing attention to racial injustice to join Kaepernick in kneeling during The Star-Spangled Banner. Kaepernick himself was out of a job, and though a few players said they thought he should be on a roster, the season began and he most obviously was not. Other than the few players showing solidarity with him, that was that. The story had run its course.

Trump promptly took those dying embers, dumped gasoline on them, and fired up his blowtorch. It’s not that every team is suddenly populated with dozens of players who cared enough about police brutality or racial inequality to kneel on the sidelines, but the league, almost as a whole, took issue with the president’s assertion that players should be fired over an act of peaceful protest.

Owners, executives, broadcasters, coaches, players: Sunday was a mobilization of people talking politics when normally they would much rather be discussing imposing their will and establishing the run and various other cliches. Set aside whatever you might think about kneeling during an anthem, or raising one’s fist: the backlash isn’t about that. It’s about the right to do it, the right of an NFL player to make a benign statement without the country’s elected leader calling on them to lose their job.

When the ESPN anchor Jemele Hill called Trump a white supremacist on Twitter recently and the White House called for her to be fired, the president’s defenders said his position was justified because what Hill had said was so inflammatory. But in his war with the NFL — one entirely of his making, since the comment that started it all came unprompted in a Friday night speech — Trump has made clear that you don’t even have to saying anything particularly untoward to be worthy of dismissal from your job. You don’t even have to say anything at all. You just have to do something that he doesn’t like.

Trump will no doubt continue to insist that players should be fired for kneeling, and they will keep doing it, acutely aware that there is now much safety in numbers.

In the NBA, where big names like Gregg Popovich and Steve Kerr were already firmly anti-Trump, the fact that the Golden State Warriors have been told they are not welcome at the White House will be a point of pride. It would be a surprise if the NBA season didn’t open next month with players making a show of protest during the anthem ceremonies. Bruce Maxwell of the Oakland A’s kneeled during the anthem on Saturday night, and other baseball players may yet follow.

The NHL, which has been largely immune to the various Trump controversies due at least in part to the relative lack of Americans — and almost total lack of African-Americans — playing in it, managed to insert itself right in the middle of the discussion, and not in a good way, on Sunday when the Pittsburgh Penguins announced that they would visit the White House, as champions do. Good timing there, fellas. Pittsburgh Penguins issue statement: “Our league is extremely white.”

But it’s with the NFL where this story will reside, for now. For all of its flaws, it’s America’s most popular sports league, and the President decided to pick a fight with it. Did he think that an organization full of some of the largest humans on the planet would respond meekly to being bullied?

Instead, he spurred dozens of players throughout the league to openly defy his toothless commands, and hundreds more to lock arms with one another in a show of unity.

Next time, Trump might want to stick to firing his own employees. He’s quite good at that.